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The Experience Economy

nytimes.com

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Re: The Experience Economy

#41

Post by olalonde »

nostrademons wrote: post #38
zohebv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are not talking about "survival". If an alien were to observe that of the 3 tribes one spent 50 hrs working, the other 30 hrs and 20 hrs respectively, he will conclude that it is the tribes working 50 hrs that have a tough time surviving. The other tribes weren't hanging on for dear life, otherwise they would have worked much harder. They have plenty to eat and hence plenty of leisure time. Also, I dispute tha…

Grandparent's point is that you haven't held everything constant. Hunter-gatherer types don't have a home. If you are willing to go homeless, you can live for $15-20/day in most cities. That's less than 20-30 hours of work/week in most places. Hunter-gatherer bands also have a total mating pool measured in the half dozens. If you restrict yourself to fellow homeless people, you're likely to meet a similar number of w…

Actually, in Quebec (not sure about other provinces and the US), you can live comfortably (if we compare with hunter-gatherers) without working at all through welfare.

Re: The Experience Economy

#42

Post by nopinsight »

A key concern is whether there will be enough good jobs for people with insufficient intelligence or training in post-material world.

It is common for anyone who has lived in a developing country to see a big divide between plenty of people who hold unskilled service jobs and a much smaller minority whose jobs require some sort of intellectual abilities or high-level salesmanship. Wage of the latter group is 7-20 times larger than the former. The middle group, whose jobs revolve around routine skills like clerical or secretarial tasks, see their jobs disappear one by one. For example, Google translation and IBM's Watson systems, once a bit more mature, will be better than lower-skilled translators and researchers.

If middle-tier jobs are reduced to an insignificant amount, the world of jobs will be divided into two major classes:

1) Jobs that require high-level of intelligence to make decisions/automate tasks/invent new technology or those that require purposeful human relations building and salesmanship.

2) Jobs to service those holding jobs in class 1)

The problem, as implied by the article, is that the number of people needed to do jobs in class 1) is much smaller than world population. The excess of labor pool for jobs in class 2) leads to much reduced wages and clear division in standard of living. With increasing wealth in society and distribution program, people holding class-2 jobs can still live fairly comfortably, but the ideal of egalitarian society will be even further from reality than today. (Egalitarian societies did not exist for most of history; they are in fact quite an anomaly to appear in quite a few countries in the world today--even in imperfect form.) Will the class-1 job holders protest ever louder about increasing wealth redistribution to the mass? Will the class-2 job holders be unsatisfied with status quo and seek to confiscate more wealth from the other group?

Is there a good way to preserve the egalitarian ideal or at least achieve a harmonious society without violent changes? I invite you to discuss.

Re: The Experience Economy

#44

Post by zach »

olalonde wrote: post #41
nostrademons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandparent's point is that you haven't held everything constant. Hunter-gatherer types don't have a home. If you are willing to go homeless, you can live for $15-20/day in most cities. That's less than 20-30 hours of work/week in most places. Hunter-gatherer bands also have a total mating pool measured in the half dozens. If you restrict yourself to fellow homeless people, you're likely to meet a similar number of w…

Actually, in Quebec (not sure about other provinces and the US), you can live comfortably (if we compare with hunter-gatherers) without working at all through welfare.

And then you can spend far more than twenty hours a week hunting and gathering in online games. Plus ça change...

Re: The Experience Economy

#45

Post by mitcheme »

nostrademons wrote: post #38
zohebv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we are not talking about "survival". If an alien were to observe that of the 3 tribes one spent 50 hrs working, the other 30 hrs and 20 hrs respectively, he will conclude that it is the tribes working 50 hrs that have a tough time surviving. The other tribes weren't hanging on for dear life, otherwise they would have worked much harder. They have plenty to eat and hence plenty of leisure time. Also, I dispute tha…

Grandparent's point is that you haven't held everything constant. Hunter-gatherer types don't have a home. If you are willing to go homeless, you can live for $15-20/day in most cities. That's less than 20-30 hours of work/week in most places. Hunter-gatherer bands also have a total mating pool measured in the half dozens. If you restrict yourself to fellow homeless people, you're likely to meet a similar number of w…

It would be so much more useful to hold happiness or quality of life constant instead. I really don't think it's a meaningful improvement to have ten times as much material wealth if that goes along with a fifteenfold increase in the amount of material wealth you think you "need", especially if that goes along with increased workload, stress, responsibility, etc., and decreased leisure time, time with family, health, etc. To most westerners it seems obvious that a nice house and your pick of hundreds of mates will make you happier, but that's just because it's how we grew up. If we packed it up and tried to go hunter-gatherer tomorrow, we would fail miserably and be miserable doing it -- but that's what exactly happens when hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies suddenly go western. Either way it takes several generations to adjust, so the fact that you wouldn't feel comfortable living as a hunter-gatherer, now that you've already been raised in this culture, doesn't have anything at all to do with which lifestyle is better. Even your "objective" measurement made a value judgment that meshes with industrial, not hunter-gatherer, societies. Of course an industrial society will do better by industrial standards.

Being a hunter-gatherer born in a stable hunter-gatherer society is not at all the same as being a homeless person in the industrialized world. For the most part hunter-gatherers in a hunter-gatherer society aren't ostracized or looked down on by everyone they know, criminalized/shamed for living (finding "acceptable" opportunities to sleep, eat, piss, etc, are much more difficult for a homeless person), or surrounded by messages that a person's worth is measured by whether they own the right things. Being able to comfortably meet biological needs, having meaningful social connections, retaining dignity and self-respect -- these things mean a lot.'N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman' is an interesting documentary about a woman whose life took a dramatic turn for the worse after the introduction of western culture, even though she probably ended up being the richest person in her tribe.

AFAICT more technology has nearly always led to us taking up different kinds of work to fill up that time, not more leisure. When modern household appliances were introduced, the result was higher standards for housekeeping. Women in the 70's spent slightly more time doing housework than women in the 20's did despite all the new "conveniences". Were houses in the 20's disgustingly filthy? No. Did the increase in cleanliness make society as a whole happier or better off? I doubt it. If anything, I suspect the obsession with cleanliness has just contributed to increased rates in allergies, weaker immune systems, etc. Technically, access to these appliances are considered a standard of living increase, but all it really did was make us pickier about what an "acceptable" living is. Now people who can't afford those conveniences have to work harder to keep up or be shamed by others for having a "dirty" house.

People comparing themselves to others is very relevant, because those comparisons have a huge impact on happiness and quality of life, and it is generally assumed that a higher standard of living correlates with those things. (If you disagree, can you explain why having a higher standard of living is a good thing? Why is it rising? Why do we even care about it?) If that's a wrong assumption it needs to be challenged because from what I can tell it's basically a cornerstone of western civilization right now.

Re: The Experience Economy

#47

Post by nostrademons »

mitcheme wrote: post #45
nostrademons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandparent's point is that you haven't held everything constant. Hunter-gatherer types don't have a home. If you are willing to go homeless, you can live for $15-20/day in most cities. That's less than 20-30 hours of work/week in most places. Hunter-gatherer bands also have a total mating pool measured in the half dozens. If you restrict yourself to fellow homeless people, you're likely to meet a similar number of w…

It would be so much more useful to hold happiness or quality of life constant instead. I really don't think it's a meaningful improvement to have ten times as much material wealth if that goes along with a fifteenfold increase in the amount of material wealth you think you "need", especially if that goes along with increased workload, stress, responsibility, etc., and decreased leisure time, time with family, health,…

Happiness is constant. That's the whole point of all the research into the hedonic treadmill. Good or bad things in your life can make you feel happy for a short period of time, but eventually we return to our set point, which is largely determined by genetics.

Given that you're fucked over by your genes and can't actually make yourself happier, why not live your life based on maximizing your standard of living? At least that way, you can look back and say "Well, even if all those things I'm stressing out about happened, I lost my job and my family and had to go homeless, and no girls would talk to me, I'd still be better off than a hunter-gatherer."

It's not that achieving a higher standard of living makes you happier, it's that achieving a higher standard of living and believing that standard of living is the key to happiness lets you look back and see by an "objective" measure that you're doing better than you were before, and that makes you happy.

Re: The Experience Economy

#48

Post by Tycho »

groby_b wrote: post #12
Tycho wrote: post #6

So US growth started stagnating in 1974 (allegedly). There's something familiar about that number. Something to do with the gold standard? Coincidence?

Unless you can back up that statement with anything else but speculation, yes. 1974 is also the year I got my first chemistry kit. That's about as relevant to the discussion.

It wasn't a statement, it was a question. So now questions about monetary policies in threads about economic stagnation are being down voted on HN, good to know.

Re: The Experience Economy

#49

Post by VladRussian »

nostrademons wrote: post #39
VladRussian wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tragedy of this seems to be that we're running out of stuff for people to do. There is a lot to do for humans. Just look at the problems in any area of science. Not all people are qualified to work there though. This is why instead of whining about disappearing of menial labor jobs, we should be working toward [what would be at least a start] making K16 a basic level of education instead of K12. A thousand year…

I'd fix K-12 before we make K-16 the default. You could easily learn fit the amount of material in a K-16 education into 12 years if those 12 years weren't just a matter of putting in time without any real focus on learning the material. Let's improve quality of education before increasing quantity.

>You could easily learn fit the amount of material in a K-16 education into 12 years

>Let's improve quality of education before increasing quantity.

nice sound bites. Complete rubbish. The whole amount of K-12 material is comparable in size with amount of material consumed in just one, max 2, years of college. But it doesn't work in the opposite way. I graduated from a top math and physics high school where students were selected from half of the country. The amount of additional material what we were able to consume during the high school pales in comparison with amount of material we consumed later at the University. The brains is still not there at this age. Hormones already are :)

Re: The Experience Economy

#50

Post by Unseelie »

calvinfroedge wrote: post #23
Unseelie wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the fact that our global growth rate has been dropping for the last twenty years, I'd like to point out that actually feeding the population isn't a problem. Feeding it beef may well be, but the primary issues with world starvation is that the market is held above their heads by unnatural means (fallow field subsidies in the US, solar subsidies in Europe, and lack of agricultural subsidy in Africa, just fo…

All good points (very good points). I think we will see the cost of extraction result in a net energy loss by the end of the decade, and maybe sooner. I could be wrong, though. As for growth rates, where do you see that global growth is declining? I think that's only in advanced industrialized societies (like Germany and Japan) where birth rates are lower than death rates. Even in the US, population continues to grow…

It's been a while since I researched it, but my impression was that the growth rate had been decelerating since the seventies. Not that it isn't still a growth rate, just a lower one.

About energy, I expect that higher prices make many more sources of energy available to the market than is available now, and I don't expect the demand to drop without a very fundamental change....we've still got lots of room for energy prices to go up in our market.

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